Arkiv, Samtaler
Conversation with Sofia Carozza
I was recently privileged to be interviewed on the podcast Pilgrim Soul on the subject of my Lent Book, Healing Wounds. You can listen to the episode here (on Spotify), here (on Apple Podcasts), or wherever you like to listen to such things.
You know, any experience of trauma — and the word trauma literally means a wound — will have its traumatic effect. And there will be pain to negotiate, and fear perhaps, and humiliation, and all those things. And that is work that needs to be done. But any traumatic experience has the potential, precisely, to come back to a theme we talked about earlier on, that of deepening my compassion. Let’s not forget that compassion means a suffering with. It is insofar as I have the experience of what it is to be in pain in whatever way, in what it is to sustain this particular wound, that hopefully the penny will drop: “Ah, I’m not the only person in the universe who is actually wounded.” And the person next to me may visibly or recognisably be wounded in a way. And I think, “Well, if this thing that I’m carrying is hurting me like this, I wonder what sort of hurt he or she experiences.” And that can contribute to what St. Benedict wonderfully describes towards the end of the Prologue as ‘the widening of the heart.’ My little peanut heart suddenly starts growing as it becomes more and more able to assume into itself the reality of other lives. It starts growing, step by little step, towards the dimensions of God’s heart, which is a heart without any limitations at all.
